Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello everyone, it's me with a question again.
I find professional relationships very hard. The main reason is because I feel that they seem so fake to me.
Small talks? People who don't really know me or care about how I feel nor have time to hear my real answer still ask me "how are you today?", "How was your weekend?".
Lunches and team activities?. People whom I don't know but I can't actually get to know or ask personal questions because we are just colleagues and not friends. Still it's expected to find something to talk about for more than an hour?!. Most topics in that setting don't interest me and seem superficial.
Team work? Ok, that one is easier because we actually talk about work and it fits our relationship description "colleagues" and it doesn't seem like a superficial talk, but they confuse me at times when they change their opinions about the same thing or it comes across as if they want to push their views and opinions over others. I become very unmotivated to share my view because I know that most probably eventually it won't be applied anyway and it's just waste of my power and energy.
Sometimes I say things that cause their face expressions to suddenly dramatically change. I spend hours trying to figure out where the misunderstanding was. In one occasion they were talking about an awful accident and I found something about it funny and I started laughing and everyone looked at me as if I'm a psychopath. I'm actually hypersensitive and have overwhelming high empathy.
The style of talking as using formal sentences and professional words to sound smart and so on. Dressing in an office suitable manner which is so damn superficial because it serves no real cause other than sounding and looking in a certain way even if it doesn't reflect your true self in anyway. I can't present myself as a professional. I can present myself as Ree...
How do you manage professional relationships? Any tips on how you make it true to yourself and not exhausting while thriving in professional relationships?
This used to get me all the time in my last job. I never quite managed to get the balance right. I thought I had a good professional facade. And then when I left, I realised all my colleagues around me actually were friend friends with each other. I was so confused, like, "I'm supposed to invite people to my house and for coffee outside work? Oh so I was actually allowed to be friends with them?"
Aside from that, social hierarchy was a problem for me. I have no sense of how we're supposed to talk to people higher up differently. Several times I got pulled into meetings with my manager where they were going "why did you ask X what to do, he's the head of finance!" I could not see why asking X a question was wrong but apparently it was because lower rank staff are not allowed to ask the head to do something it seems.
Friends friends?? Like actually close personal meaningful friendship?. I'm sort of surprised. Is it really something people do at work?. Actually, I've seen that happening in people's job's but I still thought that it couldn't happen in mine. Now I'm puzzled and surprised that actually people can do that even tho I knew some people who did